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If you know anyone well, and try prodding and poking them until they bring out their secrets, you may be surprised to learn one thing they will not ordinarily speak of. Perhaps they will never talk about it. 

For example: Michael’s mother, Robin’s ghost incident on the trip to Vienna, and Emily’s tree story.

In the twenty-seven years since the incident, Emily had never revealed it. When asked why she feared the woods, such a ridiculous phobia considering her age (she was thirty-six), Emily would say that she didn’t like insects, or that she thought escaped mental patients might be living in the woods, or she didn’t like the look of the weather. None of which were really true.

She wouldn’t walk in the woods, didn’t like being close to the woods, and when they drove through the woods, she had to take a back seat and listen to Radio Four to calm her nerves.

So it was with great delight that Emily and Mike, in the run-up to their marriage, found a charming fair-sized house with a kitchen extension and a steep but South-facing garden in the Peak District. No woods here, not for miles, but there was a View and the promise of snow and chilly Sunday morning breakfasts with the screen doors wheeled open. Emily had a fondness for hawks, so when the Merlin started poaching wood pigeons right from their back yard, she spent hours lying in wait to photograph it.

They married and settled into the house. Months passed and they discovered the area by walking, Emily striding ahead amongst the bare fields like her Brontë namesake. Michael, behind her, took a more leisurely pace; and after these long silent walks, which both found mutually pleasant, they would share a pub lunch with their married friends Robin and Su.

Emily didn’t work. Michael had a job as a personal accountant, and though he worked from home she left him alone in the upstairs study. She bought him a massive coffee-making machine that served as both percolator and thermos, and he would make one up at seven in the morning and have it throughout the day without needing to come down for anything else.

Emily photographed things in the garden when there wasn’t anything more important to do. She supposed when they had children there would be more things to worry about, but now Michael was so neat you couldn’t tell if he had been there. So she collected snapshots: first of the Merlin (blurred, but still beautiful) and next of more passive, though still wild objects, namely the flowers and branches and berries and mushrooms that appeared over the seasons in her garden. She loved to photograph them individually growing, flourishing, and then dying away only to reappear next Spring. At Christmas, she used the photos to make beautiful, unique Christmas cards - though everyone else was sending tacky glittering things or (worse) a montage of their families.

“Why do those people feel it necessary to force those terrible fake portraits down other peoples’ throats?” Michael complained, waving the Miano’s contribution one year. “It’s as if they’re saying look at us, we have children, we’re rich and successful, and you should want to have us framed on your stinking mantelpiece to remind you.”

“We’re not so poor or unsuccessful, Michael,” Emily had pointed out, but the house did seem empty without an addition to the family. They started ‘trying’ – an odd expression, she thought, considering that all one’s life one has been ‘trying’ not to, and suddenly one takes a 180-degree turnabout.

Her mother had undergone a miraculous discovery of the Lord at about the same time Emily was becoming ‘active’ sexually – as opposed to what, reactive? – and she had laid a permanent guilt-trip on her daughter. “If He wants you to conceive, He wants you to conceive. Look at Mary. You think those man-made pills could really stop the Lord?” and, later, more desperate perhaps, “Spend your life taking the sin and shirking the consequences, but you’ll not escape His wrath in the end.” Well, now Emily was ‘trying’, and as the months began to pass without result, her mother’s voice in her thoughts took on a more triumphant tone.

One morning, with an abdomen pain marking yet another failure, Emily looked up from washing the dishes and gained a shock. Looking straight back at her, out of the hedge at the topmost part of the garden, was a pair of green and leaf-surrounded eyes.

Now if you are brave and fearless of the dark, and have been in the woods at night with a torch (of course, in more than twenty-seven years Emily had not), you might be pleasantly surprised to make out shapes in the foliage: a face, a smile, a bearded man. You will know, of course, that these are simply illusions – the mind makes sense of the familiar out of chaos – and you will probably be right, but the key difference here was that Emily’s eyes had mind behind them.

She blinked and the apparition was gone. Then she screamed for Michael and he came running down, disturbed during work by his wife for the very first time.

He could not make head nor tail of what she was trying, so confusingly, to say. When he did he could scarcely believe it, for she was such a grounded girl. Mike phoned her mother, who had always been kind; he really did not understand why Emily got on with her so badly.

“She wants me to chop down the hedge,” he said. “She’s paranoid, she says ‘it’s come back’. I’m afraid she’s delusional, Margaret.”

“I had better come over,” said Emily’s mother.

“Let’s move, Michael, darling, please,” Emily begged when she was more coherent.

Her mother came and stayed a week. Michael explained why the hedge had to stay – the neighbours liked their privacy, and frankly so did he. They considered a psychotherapist, though Margaret told them not to waste their money and slipped a Bible in the downstairs loo. A kind gesture, he thought. Emily finally admitted her mistake, and they all had a good long laugh about it over dinner before her mother agreed it was best she leave the happy couple to their connubial peace.

Things went back to their normal, peaceful way. Michael took on a new client and was sorry to have to leave the house more than usual, but Emily seemed cheerful and not at all worried. “Perhaps you can use the time to take some rest,” he said, “I know I’m a nuisance being under your feet all day,” Which could scarcely be further from the truth.

She seemed to spend the time baking, and he guessed there was more to it than just throwing some flour in a bowl, because it took all day. He didn’t complain – the dinners were delicious. And he didn’t think it strange when she took down the curtains on the South side of the house, telling him she wanted more light. Summer was on its way with all its drifting melodies and scents; Michael himself found it inspiring.

“What’s that peculiar smell,” he asked, but she couldn’t place it either.

“It must be something from the garden,” she said, and added that she rather liked it.

“Feral is what it is, maybe we’ve got a fox den,” Michael joked, but he did check under the garage just the same.

Emily baked a summer fruit pie and re-framed the collectors’ plates. Though the house was a little untidy with books and clothes and things, Michael knew she was busy, and did not complain.

“I think I might take up flower arranging,” she said, and the next evening, a veritable cornucopia of twigs and berries from the garden lay on the dining table, ready to be cut and shaped and wired together. The pile was still there, but had grown, the following day upon his return. Michael didn’t complain but took his dinner, a rich and satisfying shepherd’s pie, in the TV lounge.

“Let me read something to you I found today,” she said over dinner, and brought out a book, forgetting that her wine glass was not on a coaster. “This is a book of quotes from Yeats,” she said, and read:

“When a sudden flight of wild ducks, or of crows passed over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening to their rest; while they dreamed of so great a mystery in little things that they believed the waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough, enough to trouble far off hearts, or hood the moon with darkness.”

“It’s a bit over-romantic, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Emily replied quietly, and folding a corner in the page, put the book away.

“Emily,” Mike chirped, over-cheerfully, for he had been trying to find a way to approach what he had to say. “Are you – happy? I mean, are you OK? That is, you know the other month – are you -”

“Of course, silly,” She laughed. “Right as rain. I don’t know what came over me; maybe it was just stress. But let’s not talk about it, I feel embarrassed.”

So they didn’t talk about it, and that was fine with him. No one enjoyed those awkward subjects one felt must be addressed, but Michael was more reticent than most. He told Emily’s mother over the phone that she was fine, “No luck though, still,” he added.

“I’ll keep praying,” she promised, and he thought how kind of her. He wasn’t a believer himself, but he was polite enough to accept an old woman’s gift.

Emily washed the dishes one evening, and that night was a solid thing, pressing at the bare window. “Don’t you feel a bit of a goldfish with no blinds like this?” Michael complained. “I do.”

“No,” she sighed, squinting her eyes across at him, “I don’t.”

He put his arms around her stomach and kissed her shoulder.

That Friday was a horribly busy day. A client company in Manchester had requested a meeting, and Michael left very early, kissing Emily where she slept, a smile on her face and bare shoulder upturned. How she could sleep facing the bare windows with the sun pouring in, really he couldn’t comprehend. He’d taken to wearing a blindfold to bed, the kind that you get for free on airplanes.

He drove through the hills, past sleeping towns and empty schools; a few little houses had wisps of smoke popping out from them, and headed down the motorway to the city.

When he came home, Emily and all her clothes were gone never to reappear.

She left no note, but a pie was still warm in the oven, and a book of poems laid open on the kitchen counter beside the completed arrangement of berries and twigs.

I bolted up the window,
I bolted up the door,
I drew the blind that I should find
The green man never more

But when I softly turned the stair
As I went up to bed,
I saw the green man standing there.
’Sleep well, my friend,' he said.*

That Saturday, the neighbours ran across to try to stop him chopping down the hedge.

 

* Extract from ‘Green Man in the Garden’ by Charles Causley